Homer’s Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

Laodamas had boarded the Rhodian ship, she remained silent. But Clytoneus offered a prayer to Father Zeus for his brother’s safe return, and then asked Ctimene’s permission to exercise Argus and Laelaps, Laodamas’s hounds, which she granted with a sour smile. “He must surely have sailed,” Clytoneus told her, “because if he had gone out hunting somewhere in the hills, he would never have left his hounds behind.”
    The mystery deepened a month later, when a ship’s captain reported having spoken the Rhodian ship off Scyra, her last port of call. Laodamas, however, was not aboard; or at least the Rhodians said nothing of him. Possibly they had put him ashore at Acragas, where Aphrodite has a famous shrine, or at some other intervening port. Then Eurymachus’s mother suddenly recalled that at dawn on the day in question, while the Rhodian ship was still moored in Drepanum Harbour, she had noticed a twenty-oared galley, Phoenician by the build and rig, lying just inside the southern bay. Perhaps Laodamashad rowed out to her and bargained for a passage? Then another woman, Ctimene’s maid Melantho, who had been sleeping on the roof, also claimed to have seen the ship, with a dinghy in tow. But when pressed to explain why she had not mentioned so important a sight before, all that she would say, over and over again, was: “I did not want to cause trouble; silence is golden.” The news provoked a fresh crop of unprofitable speculations, yet nobody grew seriously concerned about Laodamas until the weather broke, at the end of October, and our ships, beached for the winter, were given their annual coat of tar.
    I had to bear the brunt of Ctimene’s passionate grief and self-pity. We were thrown together by household business, and she pretended that she could not unbosom herself to the maids without either being accused of having treated Laodamas harshly, which would not be fair, or blaming him, which would be indecent. She said that I alone knew the circumstances; and, besides, she was justified in making me the repository of her secret grief because Laodamas’s disappearance had been largely my fault. “Indeed!” I cried, opening my eyes wide and jerking up my head. “How do you make that out, Sister-in-law?”
    â€œIf you had stayed quietly in your room, he would have nursed a hope that our conversation had been drowned by the rattling of doors and shutters under the sirocco; it was your officious sympathy that sent him away. And if you had then roused one of the porters, and told him to shadow your brother, and report his movements to your uncle Mentor, or someone else responsible, I should not now be crying out my eyes in hopeless longing for him.”
    Though murmuring gently: “Yes, we were all to blame,” I knew very well that the maids sleeping in the corridor near the bedroom door had not only overheard as much of the dispute that night as I, but been afterwards taken fully into her confidence. However, for Laodamas’s sake I bore with Ctimene. She was not altogether a bad woman, I decided; ill-health plagued her, and on the rare occasion when I fell sick myself, did I not behave just as irrationally? Ctimene’s perpetual complaints made me even less eager for marriage than before, and I kept out of the house as much as I decently could, carrying my needlework into the garden, where Ctimene seldom followed, because she had a horror of spiders; and surrounded myself with a protective screen of women whenever I was obliged by the weather to stay indoors.
    Here let me describe our Palace. For the purposes of my epic poem I have furnished it far more splendidly than is really the case: giving it a bronze threshold, golden doors, silver doorpost, and golden hounds to stand guard on either side; also bronze walls with a frieze of lapis lazuli; and golden statues of boys with hollowed hands into which torches cut from resinous pine heart